Copyright 21 February 1950 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. U.S. release: 10 February 1950. New York opening at the Astor: 20 February 1950. U.K. release: 27 March 1950. Australian release: 18 May 1950. Australian length: 8,989 feet. 100 minutes. U.S. length: 9,486 feet. 106 minutes.Agnes Newton Keith's autobiographical novel of her experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in British North Borneo 1941-1945 was first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and then reprinted in The Reader's Digest before publication in book form by Little, Brown & Co. Sales of the book had already passed the half-million mark in the United States before the film version was released.SYNOPSIS: Sandakan, British North Borneo, 1941. An American woman (Claudette Colbert) is separated from her husband (Patric Knowles) by a sympathetic but somewhat inflexible Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa).NOTES: Although the studio went to a great deal of trouble to emphasize that Three Came Home was entirely photographed on the studio back-lots and sound stages, many critics were seduced by the high level of technical expertise and craftsmanship involved into thinking that the film was lensed - at least in part - on actual location in Borneo. Less accurate press releases widely touted the film as a comeback vehicle for Sessue Hayakawa, despite the fact that the veteran star of U.S. silent films had in fact made his post¬war Hollywood debut the year before in Columbia's Tokyo Joe. Although Japanese-born, Hayakawa was an acceptable figure in post-war Hollywood as he had fought against the Nazis in the French Resistance. Seven years later, he would virtually repeat his role in this film in David Lean's Bridge On the River Kwai. Other press releases hailed Three Came Home as a significant change-of-pace for Claudette Colbert. Actually Miss Colbert had originally been signed by Fox to play the Bette Davis role in All About Eve but she injured her back during the first week of filming. Other paragraphs stated that Florence Desmond, who had a night-club act as a mimic and impersonator, was here "essaying her first serious role" - a claim that ignores three or four of the actress's English films of the early 'thirties.Three Came Home was producer/screenwriter Nunnally Johnson's second film back at Fox after his brief foray at International (if four years and four films could be described as "brief).COMMENT: Although most contemporary reviewers praised the film lavishly and Fox went all out on a massive advertising campaign (including full-page ads headed "You Are the Real Heroine Of This Story!" prepared with the assistance of a well-known family guidance counselor Dr Peter Bios), boxoffice results were only moderate and not nearly as high as the studio had hoped. Negative cost was around $1¼ million.Nonetheless, Three Came Home emerges as a superior women's picture with many memorable scenes - the last few shots particularly stay in the memory and so do all the sequences in which Sessue Hayakawa appears. With two exceptions, acting is splendid throughout. The two drawbacks in the acting department are Claudette Colbert herself and Patric Knowles. Admittedly, Colbert is less glamorously made up and costumed but for the most part she is still her usual over- emphatic self. Her gestures, her facial expressions and the inflections in her voice often seem synthetic and unrealistic. The film focuses almost entirely upon her and what is even more of a bind she speaks an off-camera commentary as well! However, Patric Knowles manages to be even less convincing and he is such a colorless character it is hard to work up much sympathy for his situation.Despite the film's long running time, Negulesco has directed almost all of it with great drive and economy. The opening scenes are a bit wet (obligatory romantic stuff between Miss Colbert and colorless Mr Knowles and the usual clumsy insertion of obvious travelogue footage), but things improve dramatically with the arrival of the invading Japanese in a lashing tropical rainstorm. All the action scenes are very vigorously handled but Negulesco's approach in keeping with the subject matter, is sober and realistic rather than melodramatic.Production values are first-class and so are the technical credits. The sets are particularly impressive. The atmospheric photography and music scoring and the deft film editing all attest to Hollywood craftsmanship at its best.

A two - hander,really,with Miss Colbert and Mr Hayakawa striking ostensibly unlikely sparks off each other as the prisoner and the Commandant who find a rather shaky common ground,pragmatists both. It should be understood that in Japanese military culture prisoners of war were regarded as objects of contempt,almost "untermenschen",in a fashion not far removed from our respected European neighbour's attitude towards Jews,Russians,Gypsies,homosexuals and just about anyone who couldn't prove 100 years of Aryan ancestry. Few ordinary Japanese soldiers were cosmopolitan sophisticates with a taste for Western ways,but,fortunately for Miss Colbert she comes under the patronage of Mr Hayakawa as an American - educated officer who is familiar with her work as an author and a certain mutual tolerance is engendered. Undoubtedly this makes life easier for both her and her son during a difficult time. Virtually the only other sizeable part is played by Miss Florence Desmond,a popular cabaret performer of the time whose material was regarded as rather "risque".She sometimes appeared on the BBC in "Cafe Continentale",which,unfortunately,was way past my bedtime. By 1950 Japan was on the way to becoming "Americanised" and therefore no longer considered a pariah.As a recognition of this,movies were allowed to show the Japanese (or at least a small proportion of them) in a more positive light."Three came home" benefited from this more positive attitude and Mr Hayakawa was allowed to portray the commandant if not as an Oscar Schindler then at least as a decent man torn between the historic military code his uniform represents and his humanitarian instincts.Indeed some might think he regains the moral high ground with the bombing of Hiroshima. A few years later the virtually forgotten "Teahouse of the August moon" completed Hollywood's "re - education" of the Japanese people and they were welcomed back into the wonderful world of Cary Grant,Rock Hudson and Doris Day.I hope they have forgiven us. So "Three came home" is an important film historically as it marks the start of a softening of post Pearl Harbour attitudes.Unfortunately,the performances of the two leads always excepted,it is in every other way unremarkable.

"Three Came Home" would be worth seeing for the actual-location footage of Borneo alone, but its qualities only begin there. This is a powerful, praiseworthy movie, and the very reason for its power is -- well, I'd suggest it's something that many fellow IMDb reviewers underestimate: the era it was made.Several reviewers wrote a fairly common remark, especially about black-and-white pictures, in these forums: that this film is "surprisingly good" or "good for its time period." Let's take that idea to its logical conclusion. Was King Lear "good for 1606"? Was Mozart's Requiem "good for 1701"? Are Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon "good for 1942"? No. All ages produce masterpieces as well as plenty of popular entertainments. 1950 had Ozzie & Harriet, but it also delivered All About Eve, The Third Man, Rashomon, and this film. The unfortunate truth is, many people believe that any outstanding work of art that preceded their generation is "surprising." But I rush to add that indeed there was something different fifty years ago, not surprising, but important: Filmmakers showed restraint. Though it is about war, "Three Came Home" generates emotional power with very little staged brutality. There's more carnage in 7 seconds of "Se7en" than in the whole of this war film. Consider: Although it is brief and entirely bloodless, the scene where Claudette Colbert is tortured is almost unbearable.But the greatest strength of this film is its fairness. Although all the brutality is perpetrated by the Japanese occupiers, they aren't villains. We come to respect the colonel played by the magnificent Sessue Hayakawa. In fact, when his character talks about his son's death at home-- and then says it happened at Hiroshima — it's another breathtakingly powerful moment, and our sympathy is immediately with him. As Colbert's character says to him, "Whatever the rest is, there's no difference in our hearts about our children."

First-rate production from TCF. The studio's craftsmanship is really in evidence in this atmospheric and moving account of one woman's heroic effort at surviving Japanese internment during WWII. A highly de-glamorized Colbert is simply superb as real-life Britisher Agnes Keith imprisoned on Borneo with her small boy in the early days of the war. Those nightmarish jungle scenes with the wind and the foliage have stayed with me over the years and cast an appropriately unstable mood over the movie as a whole. Credit ace director Jean Negulesco for bringing out the film's strong emotional values without sentimentalizing them. He continues to be an underrated movie-maker from the dynamic studio period.We know from Sessue Hayakawa's cultivated Japanese colonel that Hollywood is changing its perceptions of our former enemy. Cruel stereotypes do continue (presumably based on fact), but the colonel's character is humanized to an unusually sympathetic degree-- even his loss in the recent atomic bombing of Hiroshima is mentioned. Then too, it's well to remember that during the war our government interned US citizens of Japanese extraction in pretty inhospitable camps along the eastern Sierras, and probably illegally so.Anyway, the movie has the look and feel of the real thing, while the producers should be saluted for using as many actual locations as possible. The fidelity shows. Since the story is the thing, the cast appropriately has no stars except for Colbert, which helps produce the realistic effect. There are a number of riveting and well-staged scenes. But the staging of the final crowd re-union scene strikes me as particularly well done. And, of course, there's that final heart-breaking view of the hilltop that still moves me, even 60 years later. All in all, this is the old Hollywood system at its sincere and de-glamorized best.